The Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, has a very active social media presence. He generally shares his thoughts through his tweets. Amid the current market downtown and FTX fallout, he called out the news website, Semafor, as the former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) was one of its lead investors.
Musk took to Twitter and let Semafor know that he believes Semafor has a “massive conflict of interest” when it comes to “journalistic integrity.”
Semafor, founded in 2022, shared a message about the company’s newsletters, over which Tesla CEO responded to the news publication with some flak, as he wrote “Semafor is owned by SBF. This is a massive conflict of interest in your reporting. Journalistic integrity is [trash].”
Mr. Musk also shared an image from Crunchbase, which shows Semafor’s top five lead investors. And, guess what! That list is topped by the former FTX CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried.
In addition, Kara Swisher, an American journalist, mentioned in her tweet that “Elon took the $ and then dunked on SBF, because it is all a game that you all aren’t supposed to see.”
Over which Mr. Musk responded that “There was a time when you cared about the truth. That is long gone.” He also noted that he did not take the money, and SBF/FTX do not own shares in Twitter.
“On the other Semafor *did* take the SBF money and Semaforben won’t disclose how much SBF owns of them,” he stated.
Semafor was co-founded by former New York Times (NYT) columnist and former Buzzfeed editor-in-chief, Ben Smith along with the former CEO of Bloomberg L.P., Justin Smith.
According to the Semafor’s Crunchbase page, it is seen that the top investor is SBF and the news outlet raised $24.6 Million in the first funding round.
Previously, Semafor wrote about FTX and SBF on a few occasions and that articles highlighted SBF as an investor in the news publication. The other investors, like SBF, have also shown affection for Democratic leaders and also have donated to the Democratic party.
The criticism raised by Mr. Musk directed at Semafor follows the lambasting a number of mainstream media publications received for publishing “puff pieces” on FTX and Alameda Research executives. Such as, the New York Times published a story that was condemned by crypto supporters after it reported that SBF was sleeping better and playing video games.
Nancy J. Allen is a crypto enthusiast and believes that cryptocurrencies inspire people to be their own banks and step aside from traditional monetary exchange systems. She is also intrigued by blockchain technology and its functioning.
Source: https://www.thecoinrepublic.com/2022/11/25/tesla-ceo-said-semafor-is-owned-by-ftx-co-founder-sbf/